


Stars Guide Me Home

by Leonawriter



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Dark Knight Questline (Final Fantasy XIV) Spoilers, Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward, Gen, Miqo'te Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Scions of the Seventh Dawn (Final Fantasy XIV) As Family, Starlight Celebration (Final Fantasy XIV), author is still going through Heavensward, but this is set somewhat before what I'm currently at, vague spoilers for ARR ending and HW mid-50's
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:55:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28252749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leonawriter/pseuds/Leonawriter
Summary: L'ona wonders how she had answered "yes" that she had someone to spend Starlight with, when she didn't, at least not in that kind of way.But when she thinks about the people she cares about so much, it's not hard to realise. She's hardly alone, after all.
Kudos: 1





	Stars Guide Me Home

**Author's Note:**

> Can you tell this is my first fic in the XIV fandom? I have no idea how to tag anything. I'm just. I'm trying. (I'm also way too tired to have been writing, but oh well.)

_“Are you spending Starlight with anyone, miss?”_

Looking back on it, L’ona sometimes wondered how she’d just smiled and nodded at the young Eleven girl so easily. _Yes, I am,_ she’d more or less said, and the girl had taken it to mean that she had some sort of _special someone_ , a romantic candlelit dinner under the stars, perhaps, or by the fire...

Not that she was about to spoil a young girl’s daydreams, when she was having more than enough problems of her own. 

The Warrior of Light, after all, was far from the brilliant image that so many people seemed to have in their heads. Always helping, always caring, always doing...

_It’ll be your downfall, you know,_ she could imagine Fray saying. Or was that Esteem? She’d known her as Fray for so long it was sometimes still strange to think of that... side of her... by any other name.

Maybe it would be, but not today. Not when she was still trying to figure out why she’d said she wouldn’t be alone on Starlight when she... wasn’t _with_ anyone. Wasn’t sure if she wanted to be yet or not. She had so many things pulling and tearing at her in so many different directions that the idea of one more should rightly be unbearable.

But when she’d said it, she hadn’t been thinking of love, or anything like that. If she had been, it must have been a different _kind_ of love.

No one asked her who, and she assumed that it was out of wishing her to have at least some semblance of privacy. 

Not that many of them knew that there wasn’t much to her life before she had arrived in Ul’dah and joined the Adventurer’s Guild and started on the road to using first magic, then the lance. Even her memories were imperfect, from a few years before her arrival.

_If you know your stars, then they’ll always guide you home, and where you need to be,_ she could remember a man telling her. She thinks she must have been young. She thinks it might have been her father. She doesn’t think most would have that uncertainty.

After helping with the Gridanian preparations for the festival, it would have been easy to have just collapsed into the inn at Canopy. The Roost was always comfortable, warm, and safe. Gridania had been safe even when she hadn’t been sure about how safe she was anywhere, and she’d always be grateful for that.

Instead, she finds herself returning to the aethyrite she’s had set as her home point for some time now - not Gridania, where she had learned the lance and made such good friends in the archer’s guild, not Ul’dah where it would always feel like a homecoming of sorts, but _Ishgard._ Cold, aloof, and corrupt Ishgard. Ishgard, whose leaders had abandoned her and whose people were left confused, in the wake of a war they had never been able to win that had come to an abrupt halt... or, it should have.

Ishgard was far from perfect, but it did have a fair number of things in its favour.

One was that so many of their adventures of late had started and ended in this city. 

Another was that this was the one place that she truly had a _home_. 

The Fortemps manor and its residents in the Pillars might not celebrate Starlight in the same way that those in Gridania did, or even Limsa Lominsa and Ul’dah; but she helped to put up the tree despite her height only making her the equal of an Elezen child. And with her experience she was more than capable of helping in the kitchen, as well as any number of other odd jobs around the place that needed to be done.

The hardest part was forcing Alphinaud and Tataru to _stop_ for just one or two days, no matter how much she wanted their other friends back as well, no matter how much she wanted the Archbishop to _pay_ for the fact that there was a seat missing and a lack of warmth at her side and lively conversation in the air.

She could barely remember her parents, and what she _did_ remember spoke of an uncommon situation by Miq’ote standards. Everyone she had ever thought she might become _close_ to had been hurt - perhaps not always because of her, but the more power she gained, the harder that was to disbelieve. 

But for the moment she was safe and warm and even just for a day or two, she wasn’t _L’ona Strae, Warrior of Light,_ she was just... L’ona. She thinks Fray would have liked that... or, Esteem, rather.

She is L’ona, and she is surrounded by the people she loves, even if not all of them are there either because they never will again or because they just haven’t been found yet, and that’s enough for her.

**Author's Note:**

> I was just thinking "it's basically Christmas already, and the fic I'm working on really isn't matching the Christmas mood, is it, and I don't know what I can do to post anything up for that" and then just had a thought of a few lines that grew into a minific. This is the first I've written for L'ona, who's my main XIV WoL (I also have a Miq'ote Chuuya, and a Viera), though I might write more for her later.
> 
> The thing about "are you spending Starlight with someone or do you not really celebrate" rubbed me the wrong way as an aro-spec person. And someone whose WoL is so far unattached, but who would want to celebrate.


End file.
